(This post is written for alumni of LEAD 365, although all are welcome to read it.)
How well do you remember the session on personal management? For most of us, this session came second to last and yet may be the most important session in terms of the sustainability of our lives and careers. We called that session “Personal Management.” It may be that a better name for this session is “Leading Yourself.”
Just last week I heard this confession from someone: “The hardest person for me to lead in our organization is … me!” The one-word definition often used for leadership is influence. And yet sometimes the most difficult person to influence in our organizations is the one we see in the mirror each day.
This may be the session most prone to having good intentions that don’t get translated into healthy habits. Leading yourself often ends up like a New Year’s Resolution: We really want to make some healthy changes, but quickly get sidetracked. We plainly saw on the margin versus impact graph that we can be just as effective on the upslope of the curve as we are on the downslope of the curve with a lower level of busyness.
Remember where the Red X is on that downslope? My laptop has a battery icon in the lower righthand corner that begins to flash a Red X when my battery is running out. That Red X is ignored to my own peril. When it’s flashing, two things should come to mind: 1) this thing is about to shut down if I don’t take care of it and 2) when that happens, I am going to lose some very important stuff I am working on.
This is exactly what happens in life when we reach our Red X. If there is no room left in our lives to recharge, we run the high risk of losing important things professionally, personally, and relationally.
If you’ve ever heard the expression “an ounce of prevention is worth of pound of cure” you know what I’m talking about. This is where having a personalized set of gauges on a dashboard can become so valuable. These are unique to every one of us, but things like diet, rest, exercise, and friendships often make it on many people’s dashboard. My gauges happen to be inhaling (what I first give my attention to at the start of the day), exhaling (what I release in the way of worry, anger, and guilt), journaling, purposeful living (the living out of my life purpose statement), healthy ingesting (the quality and quantity of what I put in my body), exercising, and resting. What are yours? What is the current reading on your gauges?
One of the great gifts of the recovery movement has been the acronym H.A.L.T. It stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired. The more of these things that we have going at the same time, the more vulnerable we are to a Red X (or mini Red X). Again, a good dashboard can help us with this.
We’d love to hear from you on where you are with your margin and impact today. If you haven’t reached out to your Pilot/365 coach in a while, why not drop a line and let us know about how your Personal Leadership is going.
Jeff
Image by Georgie Pauwels. Used under CC by 2.0 license.
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